You're welcome, and I'm glad to have you aboard!
The
Character Selection and Discussion thread is where you post your character selections. There are instructions in that thread for picking them. You can find a link to them in the post linked below. The
Rules and Guidelines thread can also help you get started, and you can find the link in the post linked below as well. The
Character Sheets thread in the Chapter 4 subforum has a list of which characters are taken and all of the character sheets (that's also in the post below).
Here is a link to a post I made with instructions for new players. It is a bit dated, but most of it is accurate. You'll need to choose one or more characters. The new characters in the Gold section are your best bet to start with, as they have the least catching up required. There were nine, but two of them are now dead and one has been picked up by another new player, leaving six. You can choose only one of them, but you'll be able to select more characters from the other sections if you wish once you've caught up on their stories. You can only read those IC threads (or parts of threads) in which you have at least one character.
You can always add more characters in the other sections later. In Sword, Raquel Orozco and Lara Voronova are still available, but they're in a very desperate situation right now and you'd have to read a lot more to catch up on their story. In Juno, you can pick from Ho Nguyen and Richard Saxon, though they also have a good deal more catching up required. Kyle Perkins is free too, but you'd also have to go back and read several pages from the end of Chapter 3. There are still many available characters in Omaha, but they have the most catching up needed. You may pick more than one character in Omaha if you wish. You will also probably have the opportunity to create your own characters in Chapter 5, which isn't all that far away.
This thread has more information on the game in general, including a link to the above post. The second page has more recent posts concerning Chapter 4.